Much Ado Costume Renderings

Are now available on-line! Click on an image to enlarge it.



Sorry not all of them are colored in yet...but keep an eye on that site and on this. Updates will be coming soon! As will Gaudete letters in the mail with audition information. Frabjous day!

Mood: Mixed
Music: "You're Beautiful" by James Blunt off of a very quickly done new mix CD
Thought: Oh...God. Amen.

See what hours of OCD can get you?

I hereby present - I swear not for blackmailing purposes - the costume modeling pictures for Salome via the lovely ladies Marisa, Maria and Bernadette!




The Tiny Toons version of the song can be found here. The trailer for Salome can be found here.

And I am going to sleep. Oh the joy for weekends.

Mood: Weekendy
Music: Istanbul (Not Constantinople) natch!
Thought: This is what happens to people who sleep in. *sigh*

God Is Weird

Right, right. So I've been meaning - I mean, really, sincerely meaning - to get to the job of clearing out the cavern that is my suite at home (I mean home home, not school home). Howsomever, I am not a neat-freak, and while I know where everything I need is, and generally books are on bookshelves (along with papers and CD's and DVD's and knick-knacks, etc.), and most everything that I don't need are very neatly in unlabelled boxes, in point of fact, I have all these post-collegiate years of paper and extraneous bits piled up on me that...I never really want to go through. When I clean, I tend to get to straighten up the utilitarian bits, look at the other bits, and suddenly realize a) why I should never be allowed to be a housewife and b) why I am in desperate need of a household staff to manage my real and not creative life and c) that I'm sure I have something else far more creative and entertaining to do for several hours while I expurge the guilt from my system about not really deep cleaning...right?

So, apparently, this vacation, God got fed up with me shirking sorting, filing, and circular filing and so thought He'd bind my hands this way. First, after a splendid Sunday, I was woken up to Jules telling me that the cellar was flooding and I needed to check to see if it was in my main area as well. So I grumbled, got up, and poked about my room - finding only one place beneath my desk where water seemed to be seeping through. I dammed this up with paper towels...and found another crack in the floor, flooding with water...and another...and another...and quite a large one under my bed, mostly sopped up by my carpet...and another by the door...and so on and so on and so on. So we began moving everything out of my room and up to the living room, and all of a sudden...

...my back went out. Just like that. Now, it's twinged before and gone out or threatened to before, but never as bad as this. Of course, God had foreseen this (probably planned it, the meaney), and so about ten minutes before my back gave out, I'd found my last ThermaCare heating pad and thrown it on my bookshelf - so it was right there when my back went. I got myself over towards the stairs, thinking that if I just calmed down I should be good in half an hour, when I realized that the pain had grown so much that I couldn't even get up the stairs. I tried walking, I tried climbing, Pete thought he could help drag me up, and eventually I found a way to go up using the strength just of the left side of my body (the pain's mostly on the right - stupid right side of the body), and got to the couch, collapsed onto it and was unable to stand and barely able to move my legs or rearrange my body for the rest of the day. Oh the joys.

Howsomever, and this is what this post is actually about, the consequence of this is rather Godly in His uberweird way. Everything that I'd meant to go through, is now literally in front of my nose and I have to go through it, and I have to have my family's help (I'm better at admitting when my body hurts, but I'm not so good at admitting my personal faults), and I have to have times of rest during this vacation rather than work work working...like I normally do.

God is very, very weird.

But good.

And so, I'm trying to remember to offer it up for whatever in the world would possess Him to do such an awful, or at least inconvenient, thing to us for those who are suffering truly awful things, like the folks in Virginia and New Hampshire, and for those who are travelling, and for my aunt's mother's passing, and Suzanne's brother's illness, and for my kids - of course - and for my household sisters and FUS friends and whatever they may need now.

So, God, the mercies, please? The graces? And, if You wouldn't mind, a rather speedy recovery? Because I'd really like awfully not to be up and about via the use of a cane or a broomstick. C'est ca. Alleluia. He knows what He is about.

Mood: Mrrrrrwrm...curieux. Better to have this little time alone to rather Zen-like sweep the basement, but still in some mental, emotional and physical discomfort.
Music: Was just the first Buffy album. Dunno. May put it on again. Heavens knows I can finally get my CD's organized! (Or more organized. Or in the same area....)
Thought: I didn't realize how much I really cherish privacy until I've had 36 straight hours of none.

Extra time to sleep

Results in three hour coherent dreams about...buying a talking male kitten from CVS and trying to coax it to go to prom with me, as part of my scheme to get him to allow me to adopt him, since buying a talking kitten would be simply unthinkable.

Oh, yeah, and no one seemed to comment at all at the fact that he talked. But he was apparently not going to set off my allergies. And....

Jules had an almost similar dream several times now.

Which means we're either going to get a talking kitten soon, or there's someone talking kittenish who's about to come into our life, or we spend way too much of our brain together. Huh.

In the nonce, marvel at the wonder that is Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry!



Mood: Lunchy! At Bertucci!
Music: "November Rain" by Guns'n'Roses as compiled by Jules on the 80's-tastic Much Ado: Guards' Mix CD!
Thought: I really must convince myself it's vacation.

HA! Creativity abounds!

Well, at least greater will to do than to slovenly be. More costume renderings done, many more colored. Stayed after and actually went through all my loose papers in classroom and made significant headway in the cleanage-uppage department! (Many thanks to commentary tracks a la The Office: Season One.) And just, after letting my brain slowly rot on Dancing with the Stars and American Idol, sat down to the piano and came up with a TOTALLY amazing arrangment for "Pardon, Goddess of the Night" for Much Ado. It easily segues from Em to C to Em to...Ebm! And back again, until the second half where it randomly goes into this cool G#m (after being in good old Em for a while) - and singing notes not completely in the chord - I'm doing 9ths and stuff! Woot! It's all very aqueous and prettiful and moody and haunty and niiiiiiiiiiiice. Much more sophisticated than most of my pieces. Hoopla! (Oooh, and there's this nifty part in F#m that uses the sixth, down to the augmented sixth, and finally to rest on the fifth. Ha ha haha hahahhahahahhhahhahah! [That thar is the sound of a manic sometime musician laughing in the collective faces of the elite.])

Anywho, I feel awfully vindicated for Monday night's post-play flopsiness. Now if I can only get myself to fall asleep....

Mood: Mieux mieux mieux!
Music: "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" by Greenday - not really aprospos of anything
Thought: I do so hope for no drama in drama, too. *sigh* Looking forward to Much Ado but still splendidly enjoying time off. I keep thinking, "Oh, this is how everyone else's life is every day." Huh.

Day Two and Counting

Day Two of Resting After Easter, the New Adventures of Doing Nothing for Two Whole Months! Huzzah huzzah! Of course, by doing nothing, I actually mean being....



Mood: Improving
Music: "Take On Me" - yay for happy 80's music!
Although: Now that I listen to the lyrics, perhaps it's only the music that's happy...huh.
And: Getting work done is difficult with visitors. However, visitors are far more welcome than cleaning.
Which is to say: I'm amusing myself by drawing costume renderings for Much Ado and coloring them in. "Back in our day we made our own coloring books!"

Vloggery

A few random videos. Only one is mine. Stir crazy.







Mood: S-T-I-R-C-R-A-Z-Y
Music: "I Think I Love You" by the Partridge Family.
Admission: Yes, it has come to this for cheer-uppedness!

He is risen!!!

ALLELUIA!

Huzzah huzzah! Easter mass and lectoring and Daddy's birthday and the resurrection and the hope of salvation all in one!

So, had an image today at communion (ironic, non?), about the apocalypse. Not what one would think - all dark and storm clouds and worse and worse and plagues and floods and torture and dismay - all that comes before. We're in that before. But, possibly, when Christ comes He will deafen the world with His laughter and will blind the world with His beauty. Where He steps, buildings will crumble - not for fear, but for the new earth, the beauty, the loveliness, the greenery that will spring up behind Him. It's not that evil men will cower for fear of His terribleness - they will cower because of His glory.

There's more, isn't there always, and I've been rather chomping at the bit (of this time here on earth) because there's so much more and this (earth) seems rather pointless in the grand scheme of things ("how weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world"), yet, they must be rather grand to Him to allow it still ("let be"). So, soldiering on.

Life is so much easier to comprehend when one puts it into Romance terms. When there are dragons to be slain and knights to slay them, suddenly all our quotidiens fall into place.

Mood: Mieux, merci - plus mieux
Music: It ought to be Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus"
Happiness is: Being woken with a rather wonderful text message.
Read these poems! John Donne is the man!